A Carte Orange is a pass that provides unlimited use of the Paris Metro, including both subway and buses, for a week, for 16 Euros. To get one, we had to provide passport-sized photos. In major Metro stations could be found a take-your-own-photo booth exactly like the ones most of us remember from childhood.
But following instructions was tricky, and in French, and it cost 2 Euros a pop. Both of us managed to select novelty photos; mine was my mug with “FBI” below it, as you might see on a “Wanted” poster. The second time, Karen successfully obtained the correct photo and coached me through it. Proudly, we took our photos to the Metro ticket booth and passed them through the window to an amused, and very attractive, agent. In a couple of minutes, she passed back to us matchbook-sized gray plastic folders, with our mugs and names on an orange background (hence “Carte Orange”) inside, and a re-useable ticket, fed into a turnstile slot, and then returned, that passed us into corridors to the train platforms.
Our next quest was a Paris Museum Pass, good for five days, honored by most of the major museums and many minor ones, at a fraction of individual ticket prices. The best information we had was that a Museum Pass could be obtained at most of the museums. It was Tuesday, and the Louvre was closed. So we set out for Ste-Chapelle, on the Ile de la Cite, an island that splits the Seine, and whose main feature is the Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris.
The island, less than a mile long and a third of a mile across, was the site of the city’s original settlement, by a tribe called the Parisii, discovered by Roman Emperor Julian when he arrived in the area in 358 A.D. The subsequent Roman presence is still visible, but not much bragged about, in the Ile de la Cite and just across the river on the Left Bank, in the neighborhood now called the Latin Quarter. The presence of the Catholic Church, also arriving from Rome, is stunningly visible, in Notre Dame, two hundred years in the building, completed in the mid-14th century.
Ste-Chapelle, completed a century earlier, 300 yards to the west, is much smaller, only a chapel commissioned by French royalty, but there is not a more stunning visual experience in Paris. “Go on a sunny day,” the guidebooks advised. Tuesday was sunny, so we went. The chapel is narrow and open, with no need for the support of central columns. Slender columns rise from the sides and curve inward in the vaulted ceiling, meeting in pointed arches as light and as delicate as wicker. All the space between the columns is filled with stained glass, 16 windows in all, depicting, the guidebook says, “the entire history of creation and redemption – to the medieval mind – in 1,134 different scenes, rendered in infinite shades of sapphire, emerald, ruby and topaz.”
The invitation is to sit on benches along the wall and simply look at these windows, that have been letting this light into the sanctuary every sunny day for the last 850 years. Hard-core visitors are invited to bring binoculars and “read” the stories in the windows, but this is a scene that begs not to be objectified. Even taking a photo places limits on the experience, though Karen, with her wide-angle lens, did her best to get it all. Several times, while we were in Paris, I thought how lucky it was, that war somehow had not destroyed Paris’s history. Her occupiers, in World War II, decided to let the buildings stand, even in retreat. Nowhere did I feel better about that than in Ste-Chapelle.
The Ste-Chapelle ticket office also had the Paris Museum Passes. Talk about hitting a daily double.
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